Audio Transcription:
One of our listeners posted the following question:
- “Pastor John.
- As a health care professional.
- I am interested in the benefits of oriental practices like yoga and Tai Chi for the health benefits they offer.
- Can a Christian practice these kinds of things that are rooted in mysticism with a calm conscience?.
The first thing is that there are two ways to address questions about life’s practices. The first is what I call the “minimalist” approach to holiness and piety, and the other is the maximalist.
In other words, in the first case, the typical question is: What’s the problem with this?And the question applies to movies, music, etc. Children often ask their parents, “What’s wrong with this?”And the other approach is not to ask what is wrong, but to ask if it will make me more like Christ, whether it will make me more devoted to Jesus, whether it will make me more powerful and full of the Holy Spirit, whether my prayers will be more effective. therefore, if I want to be braver to testify, if it weakens me, if it helps me to have a more spiritual view of Satan’s ways in the world, if it helps me collect treasures in heaven, if it helps me find joy in God and all that is for me in Jesus.
There are two ways to manage life: I can maximize my piety and holiness by approaching God or I can simply try to do as many things as possible without explicitly falling into sin; therefore, my intention is not to suggest that as long as you are dealing with a questionable activity,
you have to choose to quit after thinking about things that way. I just want people.
learn to deal with these problems with a great passion for piety, and don’t think only in minimalist terms, that’s the first thing I wanted to say.
The second thing is that yoga and Tai Chi, based on how little I know and the little research I have done, has its roots in Eastern worldviews and these roots are deeply antagonistic to the Christian understanding of God and how he operates in the world. Yoga is for the body what mantra is for the mouth. One explanation says that, in the mantra, “the person must sing a word or phrase until he can transcend his mind and emotions and, in the process, it is possible to discover and attain superconsciousness. “So it’s the use of a word as a mantra to achieve superconsciousness. In other words, Yoga exercises are part of this kind of verbal repetition and philosophy on how to move physically, emotionally and intellectually toward this superconsciousness.
Therefore, yoga focuses on the harmony between the mind and the body. Yoga derives its philosophy from an Indian metaphysical belief. The word? Yoga? It comes from Sanskrit language and means?Fusion? Or union? And the ultimate goal of this philosophy is to strike a balance between mind and body and achieve a kind of enlightenment through mantra and certain types of physical exercises and meditative postures. . To achieve this goal, does yoga use breathing, posture, relaxation and meditation?For a balanced, healthy and happy life. This is how this is described in many places on the Internet.
So, if you go to the site of YWCA Minneapolis, an American NGO, and click on “gym class”, there are 22 references to Yoga:?Yoga for beginners? Yoga for people with multiple sclerosis ?,?Yoga for young ?,? Dy and yoga for young ?,?Yoga for all ?, etc.
The same applies to Tai Chi, but with less intensity. Tai Chi has Chinese religious and metaphysical roots and, according to one definition, Tai Chi is understood to be the highest principle, from which all existence comes, the supreme absolute. This is the meaning of “Tai Chi”. Does the supreme absolute create the yang and the yin?The movement generates the yang and when its activity reaches its limit, it becomes tranquility and, through tranquility, the supreme absolute generates the yin.
When tranquility reaches its limit, there is a return to movement and movement, tranquility and change become the source of the other, the transformations of yang and the union of ying produce everything and these, in turn, produce and reproduce, which means that the process never ends, that is more or less what I
learned in my little research
Christians have a radically different worldview from the worldview shaped by yoga or the worldview shaped by Tai Chi. The way we look at history, look at God, and understand what well-being is is radically different.
In Christianity, progress towards fulness is made through a God who communicates intelligiblely through language through a person, Jesus Christ, who becomes fully human and speaks intelligiblely to the spirit, without undoing him. , that by his death and resurrection, he objectively prevails against a true Satan, against true guilt before God through a true message of the gospel in our favor , once and for all, in history, based on historical events, through a conscious understanding of this message in our minds, by faith in Christ, by the permanence of the Holy Spirit, through promises that have been understood and believed, through joyful meditation on these objective promises, through the transformation of the Holy Spirit, through objective words that are intelligible when we meditate and gradually become Christians as we contemplate their glory in the Word and in the Word Gospel, practical works that lead us to help others and through a life of transformation towards piety and eternal life in which God is our joy to see.
Is this totally different from the kind of worldview behind meditative, physical, emotional and intellectual practices, which are part of Yoga and Tai Chi?
Consider the Christian vision of health and body. If you ask, “What does this have to do with the body?”
What does this have to do with exercise and the things we do with the body?, I would respond that the Christian vision of body health is a disciplined and realistic vision that has the following characteristics:
1. We are fallen beings and we are under a curse, a physical, intellectual and emotional curse on all creation and therefore we will all die.
2. We will be resurrected from the dead if we have faith in Jesus and that is the health to which we ultimately aspire. We will have a perfectly healthy body, soul, and spirit in the New Heavens and the New Earth after the resurrection, and this is our glory, it is our hope.
3. In the meantime, is our outer nature “deterrent”, but is our inner nature renewed day by day?(2 Co 4. 16).
4. “Body exercise for few benefits?” spiritual exercise – is it useful for everything?(1 Timothy 4. 8), as I described a minute ago.
5. No must unnecessarily damage our bodies, which is the temple of the Holy Ghost, and we must seek to use our bodies in the best possible way for the purposes God has given us. So physical health is wonderful, but that’s not the it’s a way to achieve much bigger goals, but it’s not the most important either, because there are other ways that are more important than having a super fit body.
6. Es we may achieve our greatest goals through death, risking our lives and contracting Ebola, malaria or river blindness in some missionary activities. We don’t seek physical well-being as the most important thing. It’s an objective utility, but it’s secondary, because it’s a way to achieve something bigger and there are situations where we have to intentionally risk our lives for someone else’s sake.
7. And the last thing would be that any physical activity that begins to replace the pursuit of holiness and sacrificial service, in which it is sometimes necessary to give one’s life, will probably start to be treated as religion. It seems to me that Yoga and Tai Chi have already been identified with this name. They have already raised the flag. They raised the flag of the Eastern worldview with their own names, “Yoga? and “Tai Chi”.
So, in my opinion, as I tried to maximize rather than minimize my search for God’s goals and the prosperity of my own soul, I would take another path and follow a different kind of exercise.